Patricia McArdle, author of the award-winning novel Farishta, is a retired Foreign Service Officer who previously served in the Peace Corps and as a U.S. Naval Officer.
She will share with us how experiences in her career have led her to empowering women in Afghanistan, developing world, and even in America making the world a better place.
In 2006 she retired with the rank of Senior Foreign Service Officer from the U.S. Department of State after a twenty-seven year career as an American diplomat. Prior to joining the diplomatic service, she served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay and for three years as a U.S. Naval officer at a remote communications base in Morocco. Her final overseas posting was with a British Army infantry unit as the U.S. government’s senior civilian representative in Northern Afghanistan.
In 2010 she won the Grand Prize for General Fiction in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest for her fictional war memoir Farishta, which was inspired by her year in Afghanistan.
During McArdle’s year in Afghanistan, she observed the serious shortage of wood for cooking fuel in rural areas and it’s impact on the women, children and environment of that war-torn country. She began to build and demonstrate solar cookers and has continued to promote this simple technology around the world on a volunteer basis. She is the editor of the Solar Cooker Review, a journal published by Solar Cookers International, and has recently completed a screenplay based on her novel Farishta.
